


16 things Carlos knows about Cecil Palmer

by piedpiper



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Cecil Headcanons, Cecil is Human, Gen, Headcanon, Healthy Relationships, List Fic, M/M, POCecil, POV Carlos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-14
Updated: 2014-03-14
Packaged: 2018-01-15 16:00:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1310728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piedpiper/pseuds/piedpiper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos made a mental list, a while ago, of all the things he knew about Cecil. There were a lot -- Carlos is a scientist, after all, and used to making exhaustive lists -- but the following are some of them. </p>
<p>(Partially a Cecilos fic, partially a more interesting way for me to clarify my own personal Cecil headcanon.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	16 things Carlos knows about Cecil Palmer

**Author's Note:**

> As stated above, this pretty much started out as me just trying to sort out my latest Cecil headcanon. After that, it sort of... expanded a bit.   
> This Cecil's physical design was probably about three-quarters influenced by thaumivore/verygibbous' various Cecil drawings, especially her grumpy goateed Indian Cecil. Seriously, everyone go check her out on Tumblr, she's great.

1\. He's a size smaller than Carlos in every respect, not _quite_  short enough to be considered short but definitely not tall. His voice is the largest thing about him, but it takes up enough space that you would never meet Cecil Gershwin Palmer and think _small_.

  
   
2\. He's compact, wiry but solid and stronger than he looks -- he rides his beat-up blue bike most places, though whether it's to keep in shape or because he can't afford the gas money, Carlos isn't sure.

  
   
3\. That's another thing -- Cecil lives out of his pocket pretty much year-round. His apartment is really basic: kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, living room, all small and minimally furnished. Radio doesn't pay much, even including the donations from unnamed South American countries.

  
   
4\. He has fading sleeve tattoos of desert flowers which he says are from his twenties. They're just ordinary tattoos, Carlos is pretty sure. They're getting a little hard to see against his skin, which is a couple of shades darker than optimal for color tattoos.  
 

  
5\. He has a little goatee which comes and goes every month or two. Carlos loves it.

  
   
6\. He wears shorts and slightly faded T-shirts most of the time. The tunic-and-furry-pants thing seems to be Night Vale's idea of fancy dress. Carlos is... relieved by this, a bit.

  
   
7\. He can be a real asshole. Carlos knew this, in theory, from listening to his show, but he hadn't actually watched Cecil in action until the day when they were leaving Cecil's apartment for lunch and ran into one of his neighbors on the way. Cecil had spent about ten minutes chewing out the poor sentient mass of tentacles for leaving trash in the hallway, while Carlos tried not to melt out of combined heat and embarrassment.

  
   
8\. He can also be terrifying. Carlos tries, a lot, not to remember Telly out in the Sand Wastes and the calmness with which Cecil drove him there. This is Night Vale, he knows, where human life has a different value than it does in most of the world and schoolchildren are given assault rifles which actually help them stay alive.  He can't blame Cecil for being a product of his culture. But. But Cecil is _dangerous_ , or can be under the right circumstances. Carlos is sure Cecil has blood on his hands, though whether directly or indirectly and whether he was entirely under his own control at the time (or times?) remains unclear. He also knows that Cecil would never, ever hurt him, Carlos. But he would probably kill for him, and that fact is worrying.  
 

  
9\. He's so ordinary. Sometimes Carlos thinks that's the most terrifying thing about Cecil, how _ordinary_  he is. He'll watch him in the mornings as he moves around the bedroom, back muscles stretching as he opens the curtains and the absent way he does the morning bloodstone chant, muttering words which make the air feel dark and heavy while his eyes flicker up and to the side like he's going through their grocery list. All the little gestures he makes to do things, whether the tasks are ordinary or bizarre by the measure of the outside world, are perfectly mundane and mundanely perfect, and Carlos feels like he's fallen in love with an alien being.

  
   
10\. He doesn't talk much about his past, and what he has mentioned all seems to contradict itself. Carlos is fairly sure that Cecil has had a lot of false memories implanted by at least one if not several of the organizations which run Night Vale. But Cecil seems to either not realize this or be fine with it, so Carlos doesn't worry too much about it. What's in the past should stay there, hopefully.

  
   
11\. He takes offense at offensive things in inverse proportion to the way the rest of the world does. He'll excuse murder but not racism, plague but not stupidity. It's sort of refreshing to hear him actually calling out the things that people in the outside world tend to ignore, but the amount of desensitization he has to other horrible things can be frightening.

  
   
12\. A lot of the time Carlos really cannot tell whether Cecil says things because they're his honest opinions or because they're what he should/is told to/will be killed if he doesn't say. A lot of the time he _really_  hopes it's the latter. Everyone in Night Vale grew up censoring themselves up the wazoo, Carlos can see that. So when Cecil says something about how obviously the City Council has everyone's best interests at heart when they mandate random citizen sacrifice or how the Sheriff's Secret Police are absolutely justified in detaining citizens indefinitely and without trial in the abandoned mine shaft outside of town, Carlos bites his tongue. And even if it's the former, he reminds himself, he _can_  love someone with different political opinions from his own. He _can_.

  
   
13\. He's thirty-six. Probably. This is a couple of years older than Carlos, but it's been a while since that mattered. His hair hasn't started to grey yet, which Carlos is a little disgruntled at, but not much. (Carlos is okay with looking distinguished, truth be told.)

  
   
14\. He's technically Jewish on his mother's side, but mostly Mizrahi Jew, not Sephardic or Ashkenazi. Carlos knows approximately as much about the finer points of Jewish racial identity as he does about poetry forms, which is to say not very much, but understands this to mean that Cecil's ancestry is Jewish but not, like, white-Jewish. He's never mentioned his dad, so Carlos doesn't really want to ask, but he suspects Cecil has either Indian-Indian or Native American ancestry in there somewhere.

  
   
 15. He has nightmares. Awful, suffocating nightmares that leave him shaking and gasping for air even in his sleep. He's had them since they started sleeping together, on average two or three times a week, but as far as Carlos can tell they've been getting worse over time. After Cecil found those old cassette tapes, he had nightmares for a solid week and Carlos got almost no sleep whatsoever. It generally helps if Carlos wraps himself around Cecil, reminding him as best he can that he's safe and protected and not alone. But sometimes Cecil mistakes him for something less friendly and lashes out, and at that point Carlos has to shake him awake. Cecil has given him bruises in his sleep; he doesn't complain. Cecil never mentions the nightmares during the day, except that one time with the cassettes where he eventually told Carlos it was okay, he could sleep alone. Carlos refused outright. During the mornings after the nights, when Cecil whistles in harmony with the tunelessly humming stove as he makes fried eggs like there's absolutely nothing wrong, Carlos is almost more worried for him than he can bear.

  
   
   
16\.  There are many, many things about Cecil that Carlos is never going to know. Just never, no matter how long they stay together or what Carlos has to see his boyfriend through. It's taken him longer to figure that out than it should have. When he was first casually getting to know the local community radio show host, he'd figured that Cecil being secretive about personal topics with strangers was just normal, understandable Night Vale paranoia (and he was actually  _right_   about that, as it turned out). And later on, after Carlos had finally gotten his head in order and they'd tentatively gotten together, he'd thought that, well, they were still getting to know each other and Cecil would tell him more as time went on. But the thing about Cecil is that half of his secrets aren't even secrets that he knows he has. Or they're secrets that he physically can't utter because his tongue would blister, or because Carlos would drop dead on the spot from merely hearing the words spoken aloud. Everyone in Night Vale has secrets like that, Carlos has learned. And Cecil has more than his share, considering. But this is Night Vale, where everything works differently and normality is whatever you're willing to make it, and Carlos is all right with not knowing some things about Cecil. He's pretty sure he knows enough to be going on with.


End file.
